The practice of everyday museum making: Naturalization and empowerment in the amateur consumption of museographic language

Abstract

Amateur museum making is museum practice (museography) performed as serious leisure. This article proposes an analytical approach to amateur museum making that understands it as a simultaneous practice of production and consumption of museography: this is as a use of museum practice or as the consumption of one’s own museographic activity. With this approach, I specifically attempt to detect how processes of naturalization of museographic conventions, and of empowerment through their amateur use, are intimately linked to the use of museography as a whole and not only to its production or to its consumption as separate processes. For this purpose, I propose an extension of De Certeau’s ideas of the production of consumption in The Practice of Everyday Life and the article presents on in-depth interviews with amateur museum makers and participant observation on three case studies: The Bread Museum (Catalonia, Spain), The House of Butterflies (Catalonia, Spain) and the Toy Museum (Antioquia, Colombia).

Towards a Typology of an Emergent Museum Form

“…That regular, everyday people set out to organize and present their collections as their own conception of a formalized exhibition is evidence itself of the image schematic and metaphorical structuring power of the museum concept. The emergent museums under discussion here have all been selfnamed as museums by their owners/makers (Mihalache 2009a;Mikula 2015;Moncunill-Piñas 2017;Taimre 2013). These makers have chosen to label their creations as such despite the fact that they may not exactly fit official definitions of what constitutes a museum provided in legislative documents or by professional museum associations (Mateescu 2009;Mihalache 2009a;Taimre 2013).…”

“…These makers have chosen to label their creations as such despite the fact that they may not exactly fit official definitions of what constitutes a museum provided in legislative documents or by professional museum associations (Mateescu 2009;Mihalache 2009a;Taimre 2013). Nevertheless, it has been noted that museum is chosen to imbibe these creations with social capital that the museum as a known entity provides (Mateescu 2009;Moncunill-Piñas 2017). But this also suggests that there is something about the museum as a pattern or kind of experience that resonates with the maker's goals and purposes.…”

“…References included here are taken from Mikula (2017). (Klimaszewski and Nyce 2014); vernacular museums (Mikula 2015) and amateur museums (Moncunill-Piñas 2017). Having studied this phenomenon actively since 2011, I have found that the question of what to call this kind of museum regularly arises.…”

Towards a vernacular aesthetics of liking for information studies

“…Situating these informal, non-institutional museums within information studies, I similarly learned to justify my academic existence, rooting through theories and methods grounded in the positivism and reductionism of science. These were places I loved because of how they exposed unique perspectives through their sensory richness, creating unexpected experiences for me and others (Candlin, 2016; Mihalache, 2009; Moncunill-Piñas, 2015, 2017; Taimre, 2013). Yet, I've been troubled by the tensions I encountered theorizing personal museums through institutional thinking that anthropologist Mary Douglas describes as: “… Telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking.…”